This is the eighth week of my attempt to hack my body to reduced blood pressure. With the number 8 top of mind, it’s tempting to head off on a tangent about the ways in which the number 8 represents many layers of complexity and symbolism. It is a wonderful number, whether mathematically or visually (and supported by phenomena from the natural world).
Rather than going on a Number 8 Road Trip – or a predictable crossroads metaphor drawing on the way that the middle lines of the digit cross over themselves – I find myself more on something of a lay-by. My journey has involuntarily been paused.
I’ve come down with a cold, which rules out the high intensity exercise that I think is making a difference. A bigger issue, though, is that higher blood pressure is a consequence of having a cold. I’ve continued taking daily readings, but they are of limited value because my blood pressure will be elevated this week, possibly regardless of what actions I take.
Given the role of nose versus mouth breathing in reducing blood pressure, I’ve tried to continue breathing through my nose, but congestion has made this difficult.
This interruption gives me the opportunity of returning, as promised, to the subject of wine. Coincidentally, congestion also impacts on one’s ability to discern flavour, so whatever form my current wine drinking takes has also had to be put on pause.
A few weeks ago, I hit bit of a low when contemplating permanent abstinence from wine. I should add that I’ve had no difficulties shedding the everyday style of wine one may drink on a casual Tuesday night while knocking together and eating a simple pasta dinner. Being teetotal for part of the week is no issue at all.
What got to me was the prospect of giving up the wines that exist on a higher plane, those representing something more individual or complex, the products of unique growing conditions and single-minded artistry. What’s also relevant is that wine is a shared activity, so there is also a social component. In my case, the social element takes another dimension, because the sharing of wine knowledge with my adult children (dare I call that education) is also a part of the household’s wine drinking.
It was while I was weighing all this that I listened to Tim Ferriss’ podcast with Cal Fussman. Cal had me laughing out loud many times while telling his story of taking on the multiple world champion boxer, Julio César Chávez.
However, it was his wine story that particularly touched me. He enabled me to get a new perspective on the non-rational, ‘feeling’ basis that makes wine important to me.
Wine is from the world of feeling and sensuousness. Yes, food is its obvious partner, for similar reasons, although I would add music, art, the written word, and others.
Cal’s wine experience was formed because of research for an Esquire magazine piece that ultimately took him ten years to write. I should add that it wasn’t the wine part that made it hard for the words to take shape. Rather, it was his proximity to the attack on the World Trade Center. Wine was interwoven with this, as you’ll find when you read his article (and read it you must, because it is excellent).
Ultimately, it was the describing of a wine, drawing on a musical analogy, that enabled him to eventually start writing the article.
Wine has been a part of my professional and social life for so long that I had come to take it for granted. To some extent, I had lost touch with how it resonated with me, and why.
If I get nothing else from this process, I am grateful for this sense of greater awareness, whether it’s the functioning of my body or the things that are important to me. I think it’s valuable to tune into the meaning that things have in our lives.
I didn’t expect this process to go through a quasi-Buddhist cycle of becoming aware of attachments, in preparation for letting go of them (or certainly being more mindful of their roles in my life), but here we are. Perhaps this place of pause is a kind of inflection point in the octo-crossover, after all.
The etymology of the Turkish word for eight, sekiz (the apparent negation of ‘eki’, the word for two), suggests that its meaning is related to the subtraction of two from a full set of 10 fingers. In this context, eight is forever two short of what is complete, the universally recognised decimal system.
Numbers are supposed to be entirely rational, and yet there is almost something poetic in the etymology of sekiz. Wine is bound by basic parameters of science. If it doesn’t adhere to them, it will be a failed, spoiled liquid. And yet wine is so much more than its measurements of pH or total acidity or alcohol. We are immersed in a world of crossovers between science and ‘feeling’.
Like a wine’s pH, my systolic and diastolic measurements will eventually have an existential impact on my life. If this project hasn’t achieved those goals in four weeks, I’ll be knocking on my GP’s door for the pills.
I can’t say I’d see that as a failure, though.
Cal is a GREAT storyteller, who delivers riveting keynote speeches. One of his superpowers is asking questions that make deep connections. Find out more here.